I'll eat my hat and cycling shoes if someone really did set themselves on fire in a council office and there's conspiracy not to report it. Well, set themselves on fire as a political protest as per the Tunisian guy and the buddhist monk in Vietnam. Something fishy here. In the way that it's currently being presented it's fake news.

No, that is not what I said. She may indeed be playing it entirely straight as she sees it. It's possible.

However most observers of the current Labour thing – with the exception of those in the press and elsewhere who are using it as a means to denigrate Labour generally – acknowledge that Corbyn himself is not a racist nor an anti-Semite.

Yes, opinions vary on how well he has handled the issue; most people who are largely supportive of his direction, myself included, think he could played his hand a lot better*. Yet Hodge admits that she called him an “anti-Semitic racist”. That is so over-the-top it is laughable.

She is without doubt a bitter opponent of JC. Don't forget she was one of the two Labour MPS who attempted to trigger a coup against his leadership back in 2016 by submitting a motion of No Confidence.

Under these circumstances it might be difficult to see her actions as entirely disinterested.

*Good thing by Gary Younge in today's Guardian addressing this very issue.

TBF, although Margaret Hodge does have form in the past on a number of less-than-wonderful topics, she has been fairly open about admitting she didn't move anything like fast enough on the child grooming thing.

However as chair of the Public Accounts Committee she was pretty good at exposing the tax manipulations of Amazon, Google, Starbucks, et al. Her book 'Called to Account' is a fascinating retelling of those events.

I was pretty unimpressed however when she went off on one to JC about anti-Semitism, and then went on to add further fuel to the fire. She's not a Corbynite, so it's hard to see her actions as entirely disinterested.

I was a bit of a fan after the Amazon tax exposure; now I'm not. Does the Labour right even want to topple the Tory Government? Most of the time it's hard to tell.

Well, that and the idea that's anti-Semitic to describe Israel as an apartheid state. This is the perfect Catch-22.

If you say you can't sign that because in your view Israel IS an apartheid state, you are ... anti-Semitic!

It's a far better Catch-22 than the one that specifies that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that are real and immediate is the process of a rational mind.

'Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'

Big jets like 777s and A330s for China, Japan, Singapore, etc, are regularly over my house at 3o,000ft +, usually about half an hour after lifting off from Heathrow. I'm on the Norfolk Suffolk border, more or less 100 miles from the airport in a straight line.